It’s a beautiful show, no doubt about it. First, the warning wind and the rain that spills then pours.  Jagged bolts turn darkened land to daylight, followed by a deep clap of thunder, like something ripping and splintering. A real attention getter: scouring the sky, clearing the air. In my youth, we sometimes sat in the den without lights during a storm, or, if more distant, out on the front porch which overlooked a gentle valley – a whole family of us, to watch the show. From baby sister to old grandmother, sitting and watching and talking; I don’t remember fear.

We seem to be getting a lot of thunderstorms this year.  I don’t enjoy them much anymore, and I don’t find the cool refreshment that used to follow the storms of my youth. Here, outside Boston, as an adult and a mother, the rumbles and flashes have begun to disturb me and sometimes to make my heart pound. I wonder why now there seems to be such menace.  Is it the amplified effects of global change?  The reverberations of 9/11?  Or, is it me that’s changed?  

A couple summers ago, our house was struck by lightning. No one was home. The firefighters came and went, and we didn’t even know until the neighbors told us after our return. But there were consequences: the chimney was blasted apart at the top, the missing bricks flying as far as the road, pieces of which still emerge each spring from deep in the soil.  The wiring was damaged on one side of the house, and we lost two televisions and two VCRs. We were fortunate there was no fire in the walls, and no one was hurt. But the lightning’s path of destruction made an impression

 Last summer at the Cape, my younger son and I were alone at night when lightning hit, one strong strike out of nowhere which turned on the coffee pot, made the clocks blink, and the security system come alive at full shrieking volume: like an air raid siren; like we had been attacked at war.  I pulled a quilt around me, and took my son by the hand into the basement, where we sat on the steps as the storm raged and the alarm assaulted our eardrums. My son shook so much he couldn’t speak, and I had to mouth words into his ear to make him hear. As the storm waned, I tied to shut the alarm without success.  Finally, on my cell phone from the driveway in the rain, I contacted the security company. They would come, the man said, “in an hour or so; we’ve had ten-twelve strikes to get to.” After that, we went to sit in the car, until, miraculously, within a few minutes, a car pulled in and a man came to the front door, someone I recognized: the proprietor of Smitty’s Ice Cream Parlor (good ice cream!), who used to install alarms in the old days — it was a very Cape Cod moment. He quickly took care of the problem and left us – to silence, the eerie, empty kind that comes after too much noise.

 We still haven’t recovered, my son and I. When the weather says, “Thunderstorms”, or when we feel the air move a certain way, or hear a distant grumble, we grow uneasy, seeking the small, “safe” spot on the bottom floor of our house for refuge from another such storm. It’s become something more than nature: God’s angry voice, shouting, “Pay attention. Do not rest. Be alarmed.”